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Road to marsh hammock on Tybee faces opposition

Steve Bisson/Savannah Morning News - The City of Tybee Island along with residents Michael and Karen Leonard are trying to get permission to raise Polk Street Extension. The road is sometimes impassable at high tide.

Steve Bisson/Savannah Morning News - Dock at the house at the end of Polk Street Extension on Tybee Island.

Off U.S. 80 on the marsh side of Tybee, fiddler crab chimneys bubble up in the middle of a dirt and gravel road. This part of Polk Street is impassable at some high tides, and the owners of the small marsh island at the end of the road, Michael and Karen Leonard, want better access to their property.

The city of Tybee agrees with them, and the two parties together have requested state and federal permits to elevate the road about two and a half feet.

“The road has been there since the ’50s,” said Alton Brown, a principal at Resource & Land Consultants, the permit applicants’ agent. “The residents have structures (on the hammock), and Mr. Leonard is just trying to restore vehicular access.”

But those requests are raising concerns about not only the effects of the project but also the precedent it could set for other similarly situated coastal properties. There are hundreds of privately owned marsh hammocks in the state, many of them accessible only by boat.

The city of Tybee and the Leonards have jointly requested permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Georgia Coastal Marshlands Protection Committee to move forward with 627 feet of road improvement, essentially widening the road from about 8-10 feet to an average of 18 feet and raising the road 2.5 feet on the Leonards’ property and 2.8 feet on the city’s.

About three-quarters of the project is within the city of Tybee’s right-of-way; the rest is within the Leonards’ property.

In July, Tybee City Council reauthorized a variance to allow the marsh to be filled in for the road. The lone dissenting vote came from council member Paul Wolff, who noted the city has already paid thousands of dollars in engineering costs for the project, and doubling the width significantly increases the impact on the state-owned wetlands.

“I’m empathetic to the homeowners, but this project doesn’t make any sense, either environmentally or economically,” Wolff said.

Attorney Bill Sapp of the Southern Environmental Law Center, representing the Altamaha, Satilla and Savannah Riverkeeper organizations, also has criticized the project.

The project should be considered a new road, not road maintenance, he said, because the old road has reverted to marshland.

“This is a road that was even abandoned for six years,” he said.

At least two federal agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, along with the state Environmental Protection Division, also have voiced concern. EPD officials said they have particular concern about setting a “dangerous precedent” of allowing “fill of public salt marshes for private roadways to private hammocks.”

“With hundreds of privately owned hammocks along the Georgia coast, allowing the fill of marshlands for access to these hammocks will result in significant impact to the state’s coastal aquatic ecosystems,” EPD environmental compliance specialist Dale Caldwell wrote in May.

In response to the initial round of criticism from state and federal agencies, the project was altered to include three 18-inch culvert pipes under the road to keep it from damming up water.

Regulators at the corps in June still found the application “inadequate and/or incomplete.” The corps calls the project “construction of a driveway” and wrote a blistering response calling for additional information, including hydrologic modeling to prove the culverts are sufficient to keep the water flowing.

The current application suggests a $1.5 million concrete bridge or corduroy road (sand-covered logs) as an alternative to the $19,000 road, a figure that doesn’t include engineering costs or environmental studies.

But the Corps of Engineers wants to see other “less environmentally damaging and potentially less costly alternatives” such as “various combinations of fill sections and bridge and the installation of box culverts.”

The corps also suggests an elevated, 6-foot-wide wooden walkway, noting “this type of walkway will support a golf cart or similar vehicle.” Even a different vehicle, rather than a new road, could provide access, the corps suggests: “Similarly, wheeled vehicles are available that are designed to travel in shallow water, and this could be considered an alternative.”

Without adequate alternatives, the corps will likely deny the permit, it warned.

Alton Brown said Land & Resource consultants is considering all the alternatives in formulating its response.

“That’s what we’re doing right now,” he said. “We’re trying to do it as quickly as possible.”

The Leonards did not respond to two requests for comment. But Tybee Mayor Jason Buelterman said he understands their predicament and while he didn’t vote on the variance (the mayor only votes to break a tie), he supports the project.

“We as a city let that go,” he said. “Essentially, they’re trying to make sure they can access their property. I can understand if it were a new road, but since it’s been there so long, I don’t know what another option would be — abandon the property or take a rubber boat? I think it’s something we should help get done for people who have accessed that property for decades.”